On Friday, September 26 from 12-1:30 PM, Dr. Kim Collins, winner of the 2024-25 Joan Eakin Award for Methodological Excellence in a Qualitative Doctoral Dissertation, presented CQ’s latest online seminar.
Watch the recording here.
Title: Feeling-With Methodology: Composting with Critical Posthuman Ethnography
Abstract: In this talk, I offer a reflexive account of a critical qualitative study exploring how people on an urban farm experience ecological grief and other emotional responses to climate change. The project developed Critical Posthuman Ethnography, an approach that centres relationships between humans, more-than-human life, histories, and place. Rather than isolating individual experience or reducing complex emotions to measurable categories, this approach embraces uncertainty, contradiction, and entanglement. Using a practice called composting with theory, I engaged with data in ways that honoured the emotional complexity and relational messiness of this work. Grief was not treated as a problem to be fixed, but as a generative and necessary site of becoming that shaped the research questions, relationships, and ethics. I reflect on the methodological and emotional challenges of this project and consider how qualitative health research might respond to climate change with care, accountability, and attentiveness to grief, without simplifying difficult emotions or flattening relational dynamics.
